Fatemeh Shahnavaz - Postgraduate, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Tabriz, Iran

This paper examines mourning, melancholia, and their representations in David Markson's postmodern novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress (۱۹۸۸). This novel portrays mourning as persistent and endless, which gradually turns into permanent melancholia. Consequently, melancholia disrupts the structure and flow of the narration. The postmodern style of writing in this novel describes a kind of loss that can arise when established narratives fail. Due to the incapability of language to provide catharsis as well as the fragmentary nature of memory, the melancholic narrator tends to move toward silence. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva related to mourning and melancholia, this paper describes a way of reading Wittgenstein's Mistress from a literary-critical perspective as an aesthetic response to the meaninglessness of existence and the accompanying anguish and frustration for which art cannot offer the potential for catharsis. Thus, a key to understanding postmodernism is its melancholic nature, which is ideally exemplified by this novel.

Melancholia, Mourning, Narrative, Postmodernism.